ProxMox on SSD, MDADM Raid 10 w/ LVM

CrazyMox

New Member
Dec 16, 2014
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0
1
Hello I am putting up a test environment so i could learn some more. I have gotten as far as creating a raid 10 using mdadm using 4 1tb disks.

However, I am not sure what's recommended. Have:
x2 Xenon Quad Core
24GB ECC Ram
1x 120gb SSD
4 x 1 TB Seagate Enterprise Drives

I used the installer to install ProxMox 3.3 on SSD
Create Raid 10 on 4 disks
Created LVM Volume using all disk space

What's the recommended route here? Should I be creating LVM/PVE volume to store everything in? By using this type of storage will I be limiting myself?
Should I just keep it to ext4?
Do I then just create directories and add to storage in web ui?

Any guidance would be much appreciated. Thank you!
 
Thank you Starkruzr.

I thought I wasn't wording it right. I haven't been able to find much information on pros/cons of one file system/container vs another. All the MDADM tutorials are for having ProxMox on software raid. I see lots of how to's but not much in the way of underlying storage strategies.
 
Thank you Starkruzr.

I thought I wasn't wording it right. I haven't been able to find much information on pros/cons of one file system/container vs another. All the MDADM tutorials are for having ProxMox on software raid. I see lots of how to's but not much in the way of underlying storage strategies.
It looks to me like you have a fairly robust infrastructure there. I would HIGHLY recommend including a "real" hardware RAID card in your ProxMox server. These are not super expensive and will make the entire experience much, much less frustrating. As a general rule, however many IOPS your setup can do, you need more. :)

So, I would set the 4 spinning platter drives up in a RAID10 on said "real" hardware RAID card (by this I mean a battery-backed card with a reasonably fast controller and a write buffer -- the LSI 9260-4i is a good ($160, as opposed to $900 new for a typical "Big Iron" RAID card!) choice, just remember you will also need the SATA breakout cable) and set the SSD up as an extra buffer for it. Linux does this with bcache.

Hm. It looks like this is not supported, though, and I'm not sure if there is progress on getting it working. It looks like it cannot work because ProxMox's kernel is so old.

Your SSD just might not be that useful in the grand scheme of things on ProxMox.

I can't emphasize enough, though -- I really do not recommend, in fact I disrecommend, to coin a word, software RAID for virtualization without a solution like bcache/flashcache caching your writes. Take that SSD and put it in a cheap little netbook or something -- I did this with Asus's X200MA Bay Trail-based netbook and it has turned it into quite the snappy little machine :)
 

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